Graphs on Surfaces with Positive Forman Curvature Or Corner Curvature
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GRAPHS ON SURFACES WITH POSITIVE FORMAN CURVATURE OR CORNER CURVATURE YOHJI AKAMA, BOBO HUA, YANHUI SU, AND HAOHANG ZHANG Abstract. On one hand, we study the class of graphs on surfaces, satisfying tessellation properties, with positive Forman curvature on each edge. Via medial graphs, we provide a new proof for the finiteness of the class, and give a complete classification. On the other hand, we classify the class of graphs on surfaces with positive corner curvature. Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Preliminaries 5 2.1. Embedding 9 3. Graphs on surfaces with positive Forman curvature 10 4. Graphs on surfaces with positive corner curvature 13 References 20 1. Introduction The Gaussian curvature of a smooth surface is well studied in differential ge- ometry, which describes the convexity of the surface. For a polyhedron in R3; the discrete Gaussian curvature, as a measure, concentrates on the set of vertices. In the graph theory, the combinatorial curvature of a planar graph, which serves as the discrete Gaussian curvature of a canonical piecewise flat surface, was introduced by [31, 36, 17, 23] respectively. It has been extensively studied in the literature; see e.g. [38, 42, 20, 3, 18, 28, 21, 37, 34, 4, 13, 11, 40, 10, 25, 27, 26, 32, 16]. Let S be a (possibly noncompact) connected surface without boundary. Let (V; E) be a (possibly infinite) locally finite, undirected, simple graph with the set arXiv:2002.03550v1 [math.CO] 10 Feb 2020 of vertices V and the set of edges E: We may regard (V; E) as a 1-dimensional topological space. Let ' :(V; E) ! S be an topological embedding. We denote by F the set of faces induced by the embedding ', i.e. connected components of the complement of the embedding image of (V; E) in S: We write G = (V; E; F ) for the cellular complex structure induced by the embedding, which is called a graph on a surface [30] (or a semiplanar graph [22]). For any σ 2 F; we denote by σ the closure of σ in S; which is called the closed face. We say that a semiplanar graph G = (V; E; F ) is a tessellation of S if the following hold, see e.g. [26]: (i) For any compact set K ⊂ S; K can be covered by finitely many closed faces. (ii) Every closed face is homeomorphic to a closed disk whose boundary consists of finitely many edges of the graph. 1 2 YOHJI AKAMA, BOBO HUA, YANHUI SU, AND HAOHANG ZHANG (iii) Every edge is contained in exactly two different closed faces. (iv) If two closed faces intersect, then the intersection is either a vertex or the closure of an edge. One can show that a tessellation of S is finite if and only if S is compact. It is called a planar tessellation (resp. a tessellation in the real projective plane) if S is the sphere S2 or the plane R2 (resp. RP 2). In this paper, we always consider tessellations, and call planar tessellations planar graphs for simplicity. For a graph on a surface G = (V; E; F ); two vertices x; y are called neighbors if there is an edge connecting x and y; denoted by x ∼ y: Two elements in V; E; F are called incident if the closures of their embedding images intersect. If one is contained in the closure of the other, then we write like x ≺ e; e ≺ σ; x ≺ σ; for x 2 V; e 2 E; σ 2 F: We denote by jxj (resp. jσj) the degree of a vertex x (resp. a face σ), i.e. the number of neighbors of x (resp. the number of edges incident to σ). In this paper, we only consider semiplanar graphs satisfying the following: for any vertex x and face σ; jxj ≥ 3; jσj ≥ 3: Given a graph G = (V; E; F ) on a surface S; the combinatorial curvature at a vertex x is defined as jxj X 1 Φ(x) = 1 − + : 2 jσj σ2F :x≺σ We endow S with a canonical piecewise flat metric as follows: assign each edge length one, replace each face by a regular Euclidean polygon of side-length one with same facial degree, and glue these polygons along the common edges; see [8] for gluing metrics. The ambient space S equipped with the gluing metric is called the (regular Euclidean) polyhedral surface of G; denoted by S(G): For the metric surface S(G), the generalized Gaussian curvature is a measure concentrated on vertices, whose mass at each vertex x is given by the angle defect K(x); i.e. 2π minus the total angle at x: One easily sees that 1 Φ(x) = K(x); 8x 2 V; 2π where K(x) is the angle defect, i.e. the discrete Gaussian curvature, at the vertex x: If S is compact, the discrete Gauss-Bonnet theorem reads as X (1) Φ(x) = χ(S); x2V where χ(·) is the Euler characteristic of S: A planar graph G has nonnegative combinatorial curvature if and only if the polyhedral surface S(G) is a generalized convex surface in the sense of Alexandrov, see [9, 8, 22]. Higuchi [20] conjectured a discrete Bonnet-Myers theorem that a graph on a surface G with positive combinatorial curvature everywhere is finite. It was confirmed by DeVos and Mohar [13], see e.g. [11, 10, 32, 33, 16] for further developments. Theorem 1.1 ([13]). For a graph G = (V; E; F ) on a surface S, if Φ(x) > 0 for any x 2 V; then G is finite. Moreover, S = S2 or RP 2: For a planar graph G with an embedding, one can define the dual graph G∗: the vertices of G∗ are corresponding to faces of G; the faces of G∗ are corresponding to vertices of G; and two vertices in G∗ are adjacent if and only if the corresponding GRAPHS ON SURFACES WITH POSITIVE FRRMAN OR CORNER CUVATURES 3 faces in G share a common edge. One can show that for a finite graph G; it is a tes- sellation if and only if so is G∗; see e.g. [4]. For a graph on a surface G with positive combinatorial curvature, the dual graph may not have nonnegative combinatorial curvature; 7-gonal prism (resp. 5-gonal antiprism (Figure 5 (right))) has positive combinatorial curvature everywhere, but the dual, the 7-gonal bipyramid (resp. 5- gonal pseudo-double wheel (Figure 8 (upper right))), has negative curvature at the two apexes. This means that the dual operation doesn't preserve the class of graphs on surfaces with positive combinatorial curvature. We will study some curvature notions of graphs on surfaces, for which the dual operation is closed on the class of graphs with positive curvature. Motivated by Bochner techniques for differential forms in Riemannian geometry, Forman [15] introduced the curvature on general CW complexes, which is now called the Forman curvature. For a compact Riemannian manifold M; let ∆p be the Hodge Laplacian on p-forms, p 2 N0: The Bochner-Weitzenb¨ock formula reads as ∗ ∆p = (rp) rp + Fp; where rp is the Levi-Civita covariant derivative operator on p-forms and Fp de- notes the curvature operator on p-forms. On a CW complex, Forman derived an analogous formula for the discrete Hodge Laplacian and defined the remainder term Fp as the discrete curvature on p-cells. In this paper, we only consider the Forman curvature F1 on 1-cells, i.e. edges, with weight one everywhere. This curvature F1 corresponds to the discrete analog of Ricci curvature, and we will denote it by RicF in this paper. For a graph on a surface G = (V; E; F ); two edges e1 and e2 are called parallel neighbors if one and only one of the following holds: (1) There exists x 2 V such that x ≺ e1; x ≺ e2: (2) There exists σ 2 F such that e1 ≺ σ; e2 ≺ σ: The Forman curvature of an edge e is defined as, see [15], (2) RicF (e) = #fσ 2 F : e ≺ σg+#fx 2 V : x ≺ eg−#fparallel neighbors of eg: We are interested in graphs on surfaces with positive Forman curvature (every- where). Note that a graph on surface with positive Forman curvature may not be a tessellation, see e.g. Figure 1. There are infinitely many nontessellation, pla- 2 Figure 1. The graph C4 embedded in S . Each edge e has RicF (e) = 3: nar graphs with positive Forman curvature (everywhere). For example, the star graph K1;n (n ≥ 1) has positive Forman curvature 3 everywhere. In this paper, we only study the class of tessellations on surfaces with positive Forman curvature, denoted by FC+: One easily checks that the class FC+ is closed under the dual operation. Forman proved discrete analogs of Bochner's theorem and the Bonnet- Myers theorem for \quasi-convex" regular CW complexes, see [15, Theorem 2.8 and Theorem 6.3]. In our setting, for a graph G = (V; E; F ) on a surface S; they state 4 YOHJI AKAMA, BOBO HUA, YANHUI SU, AND HAOHANG ZHANG 1 that if RicF (e) > 0 for each edge e; then H (S; R) = 0 and the diameter of X is finite, respectively. The above theorems yield the following result. Theorem 1.2 ([15]). Let G = (V; E; F ) be a tessellation on a surface S satisfying 2 2 RicF (e) > 0 for all e 2 E: Then G is finite and S = S or RP : f1 e x2 x1 f2 Figure 2 One of main difficulties for the Bonnet-Myers theorem above is that the total Forman curvature of an infinite graph on a surface is possibly infinite.